Improve your organization’s use of ServiceNow tools

Master security and compliance

One of ServiceNow’s key functions beyond ITSM is security operations or SecOps. This includes security incident response, enabling organizations to use workflow and automation to prioritize and respond to threats. It also includes vulnerability response, prioritizing and responding to security vulnerabilities based on the impact of security vulnerabilities on tasks.

Other functions include incident management, collecting and processing security incidents to create incidents; and tools to identify, prioritize, and repair misconfigured software. Threat intelligence and performance analysis also belong to the category of SecOps.

ServiceNow’s governance, risk, and compliance methods include policy and compliance management to help organizations formulate new hardware and software policies. Other functions include risk management and business continuity management.

These are now standard operating procedures for all organizations, and IT leaders have recognized the importance of implementing risk management and continuity of operational plans. It also includes supplier risk management functions to help organizations continue to monitor, detect, evaluate, mitigate and remediate any risks in their supplier ecosystem. This will become even more important as the Biden administration introduces new rules on risk management in the software supply chain.

Any IT chief who has read the headlines of the past few months knows that major cyberattacks and ransomware incidents are now vital to the government. Adding security-centric ServiceNow functionality to an organization’s product portfolio can help reduce these risks.

More from FEDTECH: How can the ServiceNow approach help your organization?

Improve your organization’s IT operations management

One of the more popular ServiceNow products is IT Operations Management (ITOM), which can help IT teams be proactive rather than passive. Using insight and automation, organizations can predict, identify, and fix problems before they occur.

This visibility is the main advantage of ITOM—understanding what is happening in an organization’s infrastructure, applications, and services at a granular level. Agencies can use ITOM to create a service map to indicate which enterprise applications they rely on the most, and which services depend on these applications. Discovery tools enable IT leaders to fully understand their IT footprint across clouds and on-premises data centers.

When organizational IT leaders know that certain services will be directly affected if they shut down servers or if a particular application goes wrong, their ability to consider operational conditions will increase significantly.

ITOM tools also enable organizational leaders to perform predictive analysis of their IT environment, clarifying what they have, where it is, and what will happen if any part of it fails.

As organizations’ use of ServiceNow products continues to evolve, they can work with consultants such as CDW to help them design and coordinate their ServiceNow platform. Because CDW implements a lot of the infrastructure that ServiceNow helps manage—and as a trusted third party with a deep understanding of the organization’s operations and mission—it is a natural choice, covering everything from initial IT procurement to asset management and network infrastructure Everything deployed.

To make the most of ServiceNow, IT leaders need to continuously improve the roadmap. The platform must provide agents with a lot of things, and partners such as CDW can help them get the most value from their investment.

This article is part of Federal TechnologyThe CapITal blog series.Please use Twitter to join the discussion #FedIT hashtag.